R. D. Laing Quotes

Quotes about:

• Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Crazy, Insane World

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• If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.

  R. D. Laing

  Spring, Passion, Company You Keep

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• A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Taken, Mad

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• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Learning, Men

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Sentimental, Realizing

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Mind, Faults

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• Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

  R. D. Laing

  Lying, Deceiving, Capacity

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

  R. D. Laing

  Spiritual, Thinking, Shapes

  Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.

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• We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

  R. D. Laing

  Nature, Class, Society

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.9, Penguin UK

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• Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

  R. D. Laing

  Pain, Life Is, This Life

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• Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Mad, Religion

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• Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

  R. D. Laing

  Funny, Life, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

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• Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

  R. D. Laing

  Enlightenment, Psychological, Breakthrough

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• Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

  R. D. Laing

  Betrayal, Abdication, Normal

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• Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Life, Psychology

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• True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Self, Ego

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• Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

  R. D. Laing

  Insanity, Independence, Negative

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• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

  R. D. Laing

  Change, Learning, Knowledge

  Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.

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• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.

  R. D. Laing

  Insane World, Break Through, Insanity

  'The Politics of Experience' (1967) ch. 6

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• What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Denial, Normal

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• The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

  R. D. Laing

  Patient, Traveler, Psychiatry

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• A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

  R. D. Laing

  May, Psychiatrist, Healer

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• In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

  R. D. Laing

  Our Society, Lost, Ritual

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• We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

  R. D. Laing

  Civilization, Driven, Destruction

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• The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, People, Labels

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